Visual information coming into the brain is complex, so how it’s processed is vital to a person being able to navigate their environment successfully. We know that it’s the neurons responsible for this task, but before the MPFI study, the exact mechanism was unknown because seeing the process was difficult. Brain imaging at this microscopic level is a very new field in neuroscience.
The MPFI team addressed this issue using new microscopic imaging technologies that enabled them to evaluate the input/output functions of individual cortical neurons in the living brain. By using in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging, they were able to comprehend the orientation tuning and spatial arrangement of synaptic inputs to the dendritic spines of individual neurons in the visual cortex of the ferret and compare them to responses in cell bodies and dendritic spines.
Different neurons had different preferences for processing and selecting vertical and horizontal orientation information and the team found that these preferences could be predicted somewhat by adding up the responses within the dendritic spines. But not all the computations could be accounted for in this way. The degree of selectivity in individual neurons was not always exactly related to the whole of the dendritic spine activity. What they found was that spines with similar selectivity were often clustered together along a particular dendrite and the neurons with these clustered arrangements of spines on the dendrites had a greater selectivity. The researchers found that they were able to reliably predict the orientation preference of individual neurons simply by adding up the responses of their dendritic spines. However, the responses of the dendritic spines did not account for the degree of orientation selectivity exhibited by individual neurons. In looking for factors that could account for differences in selectivity, they noticed that spines with similar orientation preference were often spatially clustered along the dendrite and neurons that had a greater number of these clusters exhibited greater selectivity. They also discovered that this functional clustering was correlated with localized dendritic events that are likely to enhance the inputs from the clustered spines. In a sense, spines of a feather, flocked together. Their study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience on June 13, 2016
The research went further than anything previously has in explaining how the brain processes visual stimuli and orientation from our complex world. The video below explains more about the process, take a look.
Sources: MPFI, Neuroscience News, Nature Neuroscience